1. Field of the Invention
The invention relates to communications systems in general and, more specifically, the invention relates to a multi-functional user interface and related encoding techniques for use in an interactive multimedia information delivery system.
2. Description of the Background Art
Over the past few years, the television industry has seen a transformation in a variety of techniques by which its programming is distributed to consumers. Cable television systems are doubling or even tripling system bandwidth with the migration to hybrid fiber coax (HFC) cable transmission systems. Customers unwilling to subscribe to local cable systems have switched in high numbers to direct broadcast satellite (DBS) systems. And, a variety of other approaches have been attempted focusing primarily on high bandwidth digital technologies, intelligent two way set top boxes, or other methods of attempting to offer service differentiated from standard cable and over the air broadcast systems.
With this increase in bandwidth, the number of programming choices has also increased. Leveraging off the availability of more intelligent set top boxes, several companies have developed elaborate systems for providing an interactive listing of a vast array of channel offerings, expanded textual information about individual programs, the ability to look forward to plan television viewing as much as several weeks in advance, and the option of automatically programming a video cassette recorder (VCR) to record a future broadcast of a television program.
Unfortunately, the existing program guides have several drawbacks. They tend to require a significant amount of memory, some of them needing upwards of one megabyte of memory at the set top terminal (STT). They are very slow to acquire their current database of programming information when they are turned on for the first time or are subsequently restarted (e.g., a large database may be downloaded to a STT using only a vertical blanking interval (VBI) data insertion technique). Disadvantageously, such slow database acquisition may result in out-of-date database information or, in the case of a pay-per-view (PPV) or video-on-demand (VOD) system, limited scheduling flexibility for the information provider.
In addition, existing program guides with point-to-point delivery mechanisms suffer linear decay in response time with respect to the number of subscribers served. The response time starts in the sub-second range with a handful of subscribers but seems to quickly exceed 3 seconds as the number of subscribers extends into the low thousands (2 to 4 thousand).
Another point of concern is the still-based, banner and audio (radio-style) advertisements (ads) in current program guides. These ads require different production and delivery methods from standard cable advertising practice. This practically precludes the operator from directly capitalizing on this capability due to the costs of maintaining a distinct and separate infrastructure to support the required methods. And, the value of still-based and banner ads is far less than full motion ads.
Existing program guides generally have only a single video content to be shared among many guide pages. Features such as multiple different video content (e.g., picture-in-picture (PIP)), are not supported in existing program guides on single tuner set top boxes. Within this context, PIP refers to user interface screen that may carry one or more different video content. Existing program guides lack support for fully functional electronic commerce and video on-demand application interfaces. For integration with future applications, an extensible interactive system is required with its ability to integrate with multiple sources of full-motion video and play them interchangeably from a single tuner in the set top box, to open up a world of possible applications in the areas of interactive shopping, internet-enhanced television and other real-time information services.
Therefore, it is desirable to provide an efficient interactive multimedia delivery system which provides encoding, multiplexing, demultiplexing to enable multiple video streams within a program guide and to support electronic commerce and other applications with a multi-functional user interface.